The impact of Pastorini’s (Bishop Charles Walmesley), The general history of the Christian Church, first published in London in 1771, and published in no fewer than fourteen impressions in Ireland between 1790 and 1825, is well known. It has featured in a number of articles and monographs on religious belief and agrarian protest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with attention focusing on the manner in which its apocalyptic reading of Christian history, and its prophecy of the destruction of Protestantism in the 1820s, shaped and influenced the challenge the Rockite movement posed to social and political order in Ireland. Now recognised as the strongest manifestation of the millenarianism that synergised with the commitment to Catholicism and an acute sense of grievance that fuelled separatist insurgency in the 1790s and agrarian protest in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, millenarianism has not elicited the focused attention it is now provided. The focus of Power’s extended account of the evolution and expression of the apocalyptic impulse between its iteration by Walmesley in 1771 and its invocation in support of Catholic emancipation in the second half of the 1820s, The apocalypse in Ireland brings an additional dimension to our understanding both of the evolving nature of agrarian protest in the nineteenth century and, for the manner in which it integrates Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association, into the campaign for Catholic emancipation. It is a significant book, for this reason, though it can justifiably be contended that Power’s eagerness to pursue his subject into every area of contemporary life upon which its influence can be perceived has resulted in a text that is overly long. This notwithstanding, its successful integration of the appeal of the apocalyptic, of agrarian protest and of O’Connell not only changes the way we look at popular politics in the 1820s but also makes a convincing case in favour of according the apocalyptic a more central place in the historical narrative.

Impelled by his contention that the appeal of the apocalyptic within the Catholic populace in Ireland lay in a desire for ‘deliverance from oppression rather than issuing from mere deprivation’ (3), Power’s study commences appropriately with the location of Walmesley’s General history in the context both of the conservative Catholic and anti-Protestant worlds the author occupied. This was not targeted at Irish readers (and there is no evidence that The general history possessed an Irish readership prior to 1790, when the first Dublin edition was published), but it complemented the enduring appeal of prophecy in Ireland. (Power has helpful observations in chapter 2 on the diminished relevance of the prophecies of saints Colmcille and Malachy and literary forms such as aisling poetry.) It also struck a chord with a public, cowed by the ruthless counter-insurgency pursued by the state during the final years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries. For them, the prospect, articulated by Pastorini, that Protestants would be subject to ‘God’s wrath’ (20) if they did not ‘return to the Catholic Church’ prior to ‘the inauguration on the fifth and final age of the Church’ (29), which would, he calculated, occur at some point between 1821 and 1825, was an inviting prospect. Power’s account of this is authoritative and well researched. So too is the manner in which he explains how, in place of Walmesley’s bulky folio and the pamphlet form in which it was first made available in Ireland, the production of a broadside version ensured Pastorini’s prophecy wide circulation in the early nineteenth century (there were new editions in 1805, 1806, 1812 (two), 1813, 1816, 1820, 1822 and 1825). It assisted its embrace by the Ribbonmen and, in the increasingly tense and economically challenging environment of north Munster in the aftermath of the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, by the Rockites, for whom the prophecy that Protestantism would be annihilated and the existing political and social order overturned was compelling. Power’s detailed engagement with the attempt by the Rockites to achieve the deliverance they aspired to (chapter 4) is securely anchored in the evidential record. It also refines our understanding of the movement (building on the reconstructions of James Donnelly Jr and Shunsuke Katsuta), for though he is too aware of the difficult economic environment to ignore its impact, he makes a strong argument in favour of perceiving prophecy as the primary driving force. This notwithstanding, the authorities were able, by repulsing the ‘intense agrarian violence and intimidation’ to which the Rockites had recourse, to defeat the expectation that the anticipated ‘divine apocalyptic intervention’ (157) would bring about the major transformation in the economic, social and political order in 1825 that the Rockites forecast. This ought, as both the authorities and those elements of Irish Protestantism that apprehended massacre in the tense winter of 1824–5 anticipated, to have exposed Pastorini’s prophecy as fraudulent. Indeed, it might have done so had Daniel O’Connell not extended its life, and ‘assumed the status of deliverer … of the millennium’ (203) by imputing that claims that the prophecy was destined to be realised in 1825 were based on a miscalculation and that the actual year was 1829. O’Connell’s grounds for making this claim were still more flimsy than those upon which Walmesley had constructed his interpretative edifice more than fifty years earlier, but it served the useful purpose, from his perspective, of identifying the goal of ‘Catholic Emancipation’ with the deeply held desire for the millennium, of invigorating the Catholic Association at a difficult moment. It also provided the emancipation campaign with an apocalyptic dimension, for while one may be disinclined to echo Power’s observation that O’Connell had ‘assumed the status of deliverer in the achievement of the millennium’ (203), he had ‘given it new life’ (235).

This is an important new perspective on the process of popular politicisation then underway, and a corrective of those who conceive of O’Connell as the harbinger, if not the champion of a style of participatory politics that kept such forces at a distance. O’Connell was too deft a politician to allow himself to be compromised by identifying too closely with the ‘apocalyptic’ but he was also too canny not to recognise, by his frequent allusion to Pastorini in his speeches, that it was not in his interest to set it a far distance, still less to alienate the expectation to which it contributed. It may be that a specific focus on apocalyptic sentiment, such as this narrative provides, exaggerates its impact but it is given authority by the contemporary perception once emancipation was secured that ‘O’Connell had assumed the mantle of Pastorini’ (275) and by the celebration of ‘the emancipation victory in providential and miraculous terms’ (276). It did not result in the religious, economic or political transformation that the true devotees of the rhetoric of apocalyptic change believed it would herald, but this does not diminish the prophecy’s significance as a motive force of popular action, or, of Power’s narrative, in providing the fullest account of the strategic and calculated manner in which O’Connell made use of it for his own ends.

It also attests, by highlighting the importance of the apocalyptic in early-nineteenth-century Ireland, to the utility of incorporating an enhanced understanding of the operation of such forces and such sentiment on the public mind. Power is certainly convinced of its importance as, having outlined the trajectory of the apocalyptic at length, he devotes two chapters to a comparably detailed exploration of Catholic and Protestant responses to Pastorini (chapters 7 and 8) as well as an examination of its contribution to the acceleration in Protestant emigration in the 1820s and 1830s (chapter 9). These are not without issue, since much of what the author presents in chapters 7 and 8 might have been better incorporated earlier in the text. Be that as it may, and the comparably extended background and context identifiable at several points in earlier chapters, The apocalypse in Ireland is an important intervention. It locates Pastorini more securely in its Irish, and international, contexts. This might have been achieved over a shorter compass, but it serves, by linking the politics of agrarian protest and Catholic relief in the 1820s, to enhance understanding of a difficult and eventful decade and to bring us closer to the integrated reconstruction of society and politics in the early nineteenth century that to date most approaches eschew.